The banker’s first reaction was not only outrage but rage too. He would go to old Meadowfill himself. No, better: he would send the police: a kind of public deputation of town criers of the old curmudgeon’s lack of simple decency, let alone shame of it. But America, Mississippi, Jefferson, was a free country; a father and husband had the right to outrage his womenfolks provided it was done in privacy and he raised no physical hand against them. Not to mention the privacy itself which (as he told it, Essie was crying now, the first tears she had shed since childhood probably) she must have. Then the banker tried to make her take the scholarship and the loan both. But she would not; there was at least the pride of solvency which the old reprobate had bequeathed her. She just took the loan, along with the banker’s promise of secrecy. Nor was it that he ever told about the weekly tub of third-hand water; it was as though the simple installation of the bath and its connecting pipes had absolved the neighbors of the check upon their tongues in little towns like Jefferson, where even bathing habits can not forever remain a secret.
So she had her bath and her job. A good one; she could indeed hold her head up now—the quiet girl whom we were still thinking of as negative and mouselike until that day suddenly last year when the recently demobilised Korean Marine sergeant was to show us all how wrong we had been—each morning along the street to the Square and the telephone exchange, and each afternoon back along the street with the shopping bags from the markets and food stores. Time was when old Meadowfill did all the shopping, haggling for left-overs in the small dingy side-street stores which catered mostly to Negroes. But now she did it, not because she was earning money now but because, once she was at work and it was obvious that her job would last as long as she wanted it, old Meadowfill retired into a wheel-chair (second-hand, of course). There was nothing wrong with him; as the town said, he was too mean for germs to inhabit and live, let alone multiply. He had consulted no doctor: he just waited until the morning following her death and went and bought the chair from the family of a paralytic old lady who had inhabited it for years, before the funeral had even left the house and pushed the chair home himself along the street and retired into it. Not completely at first; we would still see him in his yard, snarling and cursing at the small boys who made a game of raiding the sorry untended fruit trees bordering his kitchen garden, or throwing rocks (he kept a small pile of them handy) at every stray dog which crossed his land. But he never left his premises anymore; and presently he seemed to have retired permanently into the wheel-chair, sitting in it like a rocking chair in the window looking out over the vegetable patch which he no longer worked now, and the scrawny fruit trees which he had always been too stingy or perhaps simply too perverse to spray and tend enough even to harvest a salable crop.
Essie’s job was not just a good one: it was getting better. Now we began to wonder why she didn’t leave that house, even take her mother with her and both be free of the outrageous old man, until we learned that it was the mother herself who would not go. Whereupon we had to admit that morally the mother was right; she could have done nothing else, because of the wheel-chair. Though Uncle Gavin said there was more than that. It was not that the wife still loved him; she could not possibly have done that. It was simple fidelity: virtue itself transformed into vice by simple habit, as, according to Uncle Gavin, all human virtues become vices with habit—not only the virtues of loyalty and honor and devotion and continence, but the God-given pleasures too of wine and food and sex and the adrenalic excitement of risk which becomes gambling for money. “Besides,” he said, “it’s much simpler than that. They dont need to move at all. All the two of them need to do is insure his life and then poison him. Nobody would mind, not even the insurance company once their investigator came and learned the circumstances.”
Anyway, they did neither: murdered him nor moved; he continued his useless and outrageous days in the wheel-chair beside the window, with the gray and defeated wife to wait on him and be vocally harried and wrangled at when he got bored with the view, and the daughter not only earning the money which fed him but even carrying the groceries home. Not to mention the bathroom. He began to use it immediately it was installed, sometimes taking two or three baths a day. Though after the wheel-chair he reverted to his old once-a-week custom, on the intervening days merely wheeling himself in, to sit fully dressed in the chair and watch the water run into and then out of the tub.
Then, about a year ago, whatever shabby gods could preserve and nourish an existence like that, even supplied him with a fillip for it. At the end of the War, Progress reached Jefferson too; the almost unused back lane on which Meadowfill’s property abutted, now became an intersecting corner of an arterial highway—as soon that is as the oil company could persuade old Meadowfill to sell his orchard-late-vegetable patch which, with a strip of the next adjoining lot, comprised the site of the proposed filling station. He refused to sell it, not from simple perversity this time but because legally he could not. During the early second Roosevelt days, he had naturally been among the first to apply for relief, learning to his outraged and incredulous amazement that a finicking and bureaucratic federal government declined utterly to allow him to be a pauper and a property-owner at the same time. So he came to Uncle Gavin, choosing Uncle Gavin from among the other Jefferson lawyers for the simple reason that he, Meadowfill, knew that in five minutes he would have Uncle Gavin so mad that very likely Uncle Gavin would refuse to accept a fee for drawing the deed transferring all his propert to the (then: legally) infant child. He was wrong only in his estimate of time, since it required only two minutes for Uncle Gavin to reach a pitch of boiling enragement which carried him right in to the Chancery Clerk’s vault, where in copying Meadowfill’s own original deed into the new one, he discovered the conditional clause, phrase covering the outside strip of old Meadowfill’s orchard which conveyed to Meadowfill himself only such warranty as the warrantor from whom Meadowfill had bought, was himself vested with. So that for a moment Uncle Gavin thought that Meadowfill’s true motive might have been the delusion that the law would make good for an infant child that right which Meadowfill himself had never been able to establish. Though in the next moment he realised that a free sack or two of flour and a side of meat would be enough motive for Meadowfill. So Uncle Gavin at least was no more surprised than (he realised now) old Meadowfill himself was when the other claimant to the strip of vacant lot appeared.
His name was Snopes, though in a way he was another Meadowfill except that he actually was a bachelor. That is, he was alone when he moved in from the country and bought a scrap of what had been the grounds of one of our once-fine ante bellum colonial houses—a small back lot adjoining Meadowfill’s debatable orchard-strip and hence containing that additional strip which the oil company wanted to buy, on which sat what had been the manor’s carriage house until Snopes converted it into a cottage complete with kitchen; he too did his own marketing in the same dingy back-street shops which Meadowfill had used to use, doing his own cooking too; presently he was buying and selling scrubby cattle and hogs and plow-mules; presently after that he was lending small sums, secured by usurious notes, to Negroes and small farmers; presently he was buying and selling small parcels of real estate—town lots and farms; he could be found at almost any time poring over the land records in the courthouse. So when war and boom and prosperity and then the oil company reached Jefferson, nobody was really surprised (least of all Meadowfill, according to Uncle Gavin) to learn that Snopes’s deed also covered that equivocal strip of old Meadowfill’s vacant lot.
The oil company would not buy one without the other, and obviously they must have a clear title to the disputed strip, which meant a release from Snopes. (Naturally the company had already approached Essie Meadowfill, the recorded owner of Meadowfill’s lot, first, who had answered as we anyway had foreknown: “You’ll have to see papa.”) Which would be a mere formality, since the company offered enough for old Meadowfill to clear his title with Snopes and hardly mis
s it; not to mention the fact that Snopes, who would already do pretty well out of the sale of his strip, had lived in the same town with old Meadowfill long enough by now to expect little more than a simple nuisance-value ten percent.: whose (Snopes’s) financial sights would not have obfuscated at a much more modest range than that, who last year at an auction sale had bought a worn-out mule for two dollars and sold it thirty minutes later for two dollars and ten cents.
Except that old Meadowfill would not pay ten percent. for the release. Snopes was a tallish man, quite thin as became one who shopped for left-overs and cooked them himself, with a bland negative face and manner and perfectly inscrutable eyes, who said (to the oil company’s purchasing agent): “All right. Five percent. then.” Then he said: “All right. What will he give, then?” And bland and affable and accommodating was no description for his voice when he said next: “Well, a good citizen cant stand in the way of progress, even if it does cost him money. Tell Mr Meadowfill he can have the release for nothing.”
This time old Meadowfill didn’t even bother to say No. He just sat there in his wheel-chair laughing. We thought we knew why: he wasn’t going to sell the lot at all now for the reason that a rival company had just bought the corner opposite; and since in the lexicon of merchandising, the immediate answer to a successful business is to build another one exactly like it as near as possible as soon as possible, sooner or later the first company would have to pay whatever old Meadowfill demanded for his lot. But a year passed; the rival station was not only finished but operating. And now we knew what we (Snopes too) should have known all the time: that old Meadowfill would never sell that lot, for the simple reason that somebody else, anybody else, would likewise benefit from the sale. So that now, in a way, even Snopes had our sympathy in his next move, which he made shortly before the thing happened to Essie Meadowfill which showed us that she was anything in the world but mousy, and though demure might still be the word for her, the other word wasn’t quiet but instead determined.
One morning old Meadowfill, wheeling his chair up to the window for a long peaceful forenoon of gloating, not at the lot which he wouldn’t sell but at the adjoining one which for that reason Snopes couldn’t, he saw a big stray hog rooting among the worthless peaches on the ground beneath his worthless and untended trees; and even as he sat bellowing for his wife, Snopes himself crossed the lot and contrived to ease a looped rope around one of the hog’s feet and half-lead half-drive it back to his own premises, old Meadowfill not actually risen from the chair, leaning in the open window bellowing curses at both of them until they disappeared.
And the next morning he was already seated in his window and so actually saw the hog come at a steady and purposeful trot up the lane from Snopes’s yard and into the orchard; he was still leaning in the open window bellowing and cursing when the drab wife emerged from the house, clutching a shawl about her head, and hurried down the lane to knock for a while at Snopes’s locked front door until old Meadowfill’s bellowing, which had never stopped, drew her back home. By that time most of the neighborhood was there to watch what followed: the old man still bellowing indiscriminate curses and instructions from the window while his wife tried single-handed to drive the hog away from the fallen peaches and out of the unfenced lot, until almost noon, when Snopes himself appeared (from where the neighborhood already believed he had been hidden, watching), innocent, amazed and apologetic, with his looped rope and caught the hog and removed it.
Next old Meadowfill had the rifle—an aged, battered single-shot .22. That is, it looked second hand simply because it was in his possession, though this time nobody could imagine when he could have left the wheel-chair and the window (not to mention Snopes’s hog) long enough to have hunted down the rifle’s small-boy owner and haggled and browbeat him out of it. Because (Uncle Gavin said) you could not imagine him ever having been a boy passionate and proud for the ownership of that symbol of our brave and hardy pioneer tradition and heritage, and have kept it these long secret years as a memory (reproach too) of that pure and innocent time. But he had it, and the cartridges too—not solid bullets but loaded with tiny shot incapable of killing the hog at all and not even of hurting it at that distance, let alone driving it from the peaches. Whereupon we realised that he did not want to drive the hog away; that he too had been caught by that virulent germ of self-contest which in other people of his age becomes golf or croquet or bingo or anagrams.
He would rush his wheel-chair straight from the breakfast table, to sit immobile in ambush until the hog would appear. Then (he would have to stand up to do this) he would slowly and quietly raise the window whose grooves he kept greased for silence, and pick and deliver the shot, the hog giving its convulsive start and leap until, forgetting, it would settle down again to receive the next shot, until at last even its dull processes connected the sting with the report and after the next shot it would go home, to return no more until tomorrow morning; and finally even the peaches themselves with inimicality. For a whole week the hog did not return at all and now the neighborhood legend was that old Meadowfill had contracted with the boy who delivered the Memphis and Jackson papers (old Meadowfill did not take a paper himself, not being interested in news which cost a dollar a month) to scavenge from garbage cans and so bait his (Meadowfill’s) orchard at night.
Now we more than just wondered exactly what Snopes could be up to, who might have been expected to fasten the hog up after the first time old Meadowfill shot it. Or even sold the animal, which he could still do: either fasten it up or even sell it, though probably no buyer would give the full market price per hundred for a hog which for months had been subject to daily bombardment. Until at last we believed that we had divined Snopes’s intention: his hope that someday, either by error, mistake, or perhaps simply carried, swept beyond all check of morality or fear of consequences by his vice as the drunkard or gambler is by his, he (Meadowfill) would put a solid bullet in the gun. Whereupon Snopes would not merely sue him for destroying the hog: he would also invoke an old town ordinance forbidding the firing of guns inside the town limits, and beneath that compounded weight, compel Meadowfill to make his (Snopes’s) lot available to the oil company by agreeing to release his own to them. Then something happened to Essie Meadowfill.
It was the Marine sergeant. We never did know where or how or when Essie managed to meet him. She had never been anywhere save occasionally to Memphis, since everyone in Jefferson sooner or later spent an afternoon in Memphis once a month. She had never missed a day from her job since she joined the company, except during her annual vacations, which as far as we knew she spent at home to take some of the burden of the wheel-chair. Yet she did it. Still carrying the parcels of her daily marketing, she was waiting at the station when the Memphis bus came in and he got down from it, whom the town had never seen before, he carrying the parcels now along the street where she was already an hour late since her passage along it could have set watches. That was when we realised that mousy had not been the word for her for years, since obviously no girl could have bloomed that much, got that round and tender and girl-looking just in that brief time since the bus arrived. And we were glad that quiet was not the word for her either. Because she was going to need the determination, whether her Marine knew it yet or not, the two of them walking into the house and up to the wheel-chair, into point-blank range of that rage compared to which the cursing of small boys and throwing rocks at dogs and even shooting live ammunition at Snopes’s hog was the mere reflexive hysteria of the moment since this intruder threatened the very system of peonage on which he lived, and saying: “Papa, this is McKinley Smith. We’re going to be married.”
Perhaps she had it, walking back out to the street with him five minutes later, and there, in full view of whoever wanted to look, kissing him—maybe not the first time she ever kissed him but probably the first time she ever kissed anyone without bothering (more: caring) whether or not it was sin. Perhaps he had it too—son of an Arkansas tenant-farmer,
who probably had barely heard of Mississippi until he met Essie Meadowfill wherever it was that day; who, once he realised that because of the wheel-chair and the mother, she was not going to cut away from her family and marry him regardless, should have given up and gone back to his Arkansas.
Rather, they both had it, for the simple reason that they owned everything else in common. They were indeed doomed and fated, whether or not they were star-crossed too; they not only believed and desired alike, they even acted alike. It was obvious now that he had cast his lot in Jefferson; we had accepted him. And since for years now the land had been filled with ex-G.I.’s going to school whether they were fitted or not or even really wanted to or not, the obvious thing was for him to use his G.I. privileges at our local college, where at government expense he could see her every day while they waited for the ultimate meanness to kill old Meadowfill. But he not only dismissed education as immediately and finally as Essie had, he intended to substitute the same thing in its place which Essie did. He explained it to us: “I was a soldier for two years. The only thing I learned was, the only place in this world you can be safe in is a private hole, preferably with a iron lid you can pull down on top of you. So I aim to own me a hole. Only I aint a soldier now, so I can pick where I want it, and even make it comfortable. I’m going to build a house.”